Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Valley 2 Beta .807 "Melee Deux" Released!

This one is another smorgasbord-type release, with tons of things in all sorts of varying areas. There's updated monster art, yet more nice-to-have style improvements to the strategic game interface, more sound effects work, more balance fine-tuning, and some new cheats. Oh, also a new character and a new keybind for the world map movement of NPCs without opening the menu.

The really big changes in this one are all about melee, and the resistant-to-all-but-melee monsters. Basically the touch, punch, and fist spells have all been completely reimagined from the ground up. Rather than being high-power, high-caliber defensive spells that are hard to use, they are now low-caliber, low-power spells that have one of two utility purposes: either reducing an enemy's movement speed temporarily, or reducing their ranged attack firing rate.

These utility spells fill an interesting niche in terms of providing some new tactical combat options, while at the same time finally ditching those touch, punch, and fist spells that were almost universally disliked. Those were definitely the weakest link in the player arsenal, and nothing we had been able to figure out made them any better. Note of course that the whips and tridents are still alive and well, and still fulfill their same role that they already did.

The other big melee-related change is that now the monsters that were resistant-to-all-but-melee-and-ammo-attacks are now instead resistant-to-ALL-attacks-if-a-player-is-not-standing-close-enough-to-the-monster-in-question. This makes them no longer class-specific or spell-specific, but means that whatever class you have chosen has to close the distance with these enemies and take them on up close. This keeps the general feel of the ocean shallows, for instance, intact; but at the same time removes all of the frustrating class penalties associated with it.

More to come soon. Enjoy!

This is a standard update that you can download through the in-game updater itself, if you already have any version of the game. If you have the beta on Steam, it will automatically update for you. When you launch the game, you'll see the notice of the update having been found if you're connected to the Internet at the time. If you don't have the standalone game, you can download that here. If you already own the first game, just use your existing license key to unlock the sequel for free!